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Our spring season of Reality U has come to a close with five successful events. Students, teachers, volunteers, and school staff throughout Kansas shared countless exciting and a few challenging experiences in order to empower young adults with the information they need to make informed choices about their futures.
Reality U is an educational, hands-on activity designed to teach teenagers about financial literacy, employment, and life after high school. Before attending Reality U, students complete a lifestyle survey where they describe their lives as 26-year-olds: their jobs, salaries, family, homes, even shopping habits and entertainment. CIS staff then compares their surveys with their current GPA and assigns fictional jobs, salaries and families. Students are then challenged at Reality U to make ends meet using their salaries to purchase all the necessities of life: child care, transportation, groceries, homes, utilities, etc.; plus budget for fun things like vacations and entertainment.
Nearly 500 students participated in these events – most of whom shared both their positive and negative reactions with us in thank-you letters. “My feelings towards Reality U are strong, yet poor...” writes a J.C. Harmon High School student, “To be honest, I felt sort of upset because I saw what my future lifestyle would end up being like and didn’t like it. I was an unmarried man with one child, who was in the third grade, and I was the guardian of my child. I really didn’t have a lot of money left over after I paid for housing, child care, communication, clothing, etc…After the Reality U experience, I realized that I may have to reconsider what job I want as a career and work harder on my academics.” This reality check is exactly what coordinators, volunteers, teachers, and others involved in Reality U were hoping for when they signed on for the challenge.
Among the many important lessons learned, students reported that they would delay having children after seeing actual child care prices, they would work harder on their GPAs after seeing how they were correlated with future careers and salaries, that they would seek further education after learning that some of the jobs they had in mind would not support the lifestyles they wanted, and that they would pay attention to credit after seeing how low scores made certain things unattainable for them.
This year, Communities In Schools of Kansas coordinated Reality U events at Ottawa High School in Ottawa, KS; J.C. Harmon and F.L. Schlagle High Schools in Kansas City, Kansas; and Eisenhower and Northwest Middle Schools, also in Kansas City, KS. Almost one hundred community volunteers and school employees donated their time and effort to students so that these events would be a success. Thank you to everyone involved!
We look forward to future Reality U events, which will pick up again this fall and run throughout the 2010-11 school year. Contact Polli Kenn at Communities In Schools of Kansas if you are interested in bringing Reality U to your school!
Read more quotes from student thank-you letters at our website.
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Assuring kids succeed in school and in life is our number one goal. Over the past several months, our national office has been working hard to craft new language and a new look that best represents what we do and resonates with our stakeholders. Now it’s time to unveil our new logo (to the left) and voice:
Who we are
The mission of Communities In Schools of Kansas is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. We are 5,000 professionals and 65,000 volunteers on the ground, working in more than 3,200 K-12 public schools, in the most challenged communities, in 26 states, and the District of Columbia, serving nearly 1.4 million young people and their families every year.
What we do
Through a school-based coordinator, Communities In Schools connects students and their families to critical community resources tailored to local needs. By providing students with a one-on-one relationship with a caring adult, a safe place to learn and grow, a healthy start and future, a marketable skill upon graduation and a chance to give back to peers and the community, Communities In Schools has become the nation’s leading dropout prevention organization and the only one proven to both decrease dropout rates and increase graduation rates.
Why it's important
Every year 1.2 million students drop out of school. What that means is every nine seconds, a student in America loses his or her path to a better future. By empowering students to achieve in school and life, we are building a stronger America, where every person is capable of reaching his or her greatest potential.
Do your part to help every student succeed and share our message with your friends, and please bear with us over the next few months as we transition our logo!
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